Re: English diglossia (was Re: retroflex consonants)

On 2003.02.01 19:02 Joseph Fatula wrote:
> From: "Tristan" <kesuari@...>
> Subject: Re: English diglossia (was Re: retroflex consonants)
>
>
> > kendra wrote:
> > Yes, I know... 'what' is h-less here, too. I didn't say I
> > particularly
> > liked half-arsed spelling reforms. In fact, I've tried to say that
> > any
> > half-hearted spelling reform, if it succeeds, is going to
> > oversucceed
> > and the normal spelling in Some Parts of the World would be
> > 'harf-harted'. And you're all specifically banned from saying 'I
> > would
> > spell it 'haff-harted'.
>
> Until reading the part below, I didn't realize you were from an r-less
> region, so try and imagine how "harf-harted" sounded to me!
I must say, I'm quite surprised. You mustn't read any of the english
pronunciation threads ;) And my email address gives it away as well,
unless you don't know that Australia is non-rhotic.

> > I like the look of the current English orthography. I imagine most
> > do. But it's only a matter of what we're used to.
>
> I agree, as would many on this list.  Whenever I consult a biblical
> text in
> the original Greek (New Testament, anyway), the copy I have is in
> modern-style Greek characters (basically all lower-case).  Things
> actually
> written in that time period looked like today's upper-case, which I
> have
> little experience actually using, as Greek uses it a whole lot less.
> We
> recently discussed that, either here or on the Conculture list.
> Anyway,
> either one works, and you can get used to whichever you use.
>
> > There's nothing inherently
> > worse with having written 'ai laik ov dhe karent Ingglish
> oothografi'
> > (unless you have Rs pronounced, or say 'current' as /kr=@nt/, or
> > whatever, but we don't need to hear it).
>
> Sure, we don't need a whole, "But I say it like _this_!" thread.  But
> here's
> where there is something inherently worse with that spelling.  It
> might be
> better for your part of the world, but I would have spent quite a
> while
> figuring out what "karent" was supposed to mean.
Yeah, I know that. My statement was supposed to directly relate to the
looks of it. (It was in the same paragraph.)

> Using the same
> orthography, I probably would have written "ai leik dhe lwk ev dhe
> krrint
> Ingglish orthagrefi", and people from other parts of the world might
> have
> been scratching their heads.
>
> Modern written English doesn't reflect the pronunciation completely,
> but it
> is common to all English-speaking countries.  Over time, I imagine
> it'll end
> up being a common written language between places whose spoken tongues
> have
> diverged enough that they are unintelligible.  Who knows what'll
> happen?
I dunno that the written language will be able to keep that apart from
spoken. I realise that in French, they're practically two different
languages, but English seems happier to update itself WRT grammar and
wordchoice (even if some people insist on writing things like 'it is'
and 'would have' in contexts that seem ungrammatical to me). If 'arvo'
completely replaced 'afternoon' in Antipodian English,* othres would
have a hard time understanding what 'We met in the arvo' meant ('arvo'
/a:v8u/ derives from 'afternoon' by knocking off the end, adding the
abbreviative -o with voicing of the previous fricative (is there some
better way to describe the -o?), and suffering a respelling). If
another dialect lost the possessive 's, they wouldn't know what
'Tristan's dog' meant.

*Antipodian English is the English spoken in Australia and NZ, because
you walk upsidedown and these terms are all relative to England.

Tristan.

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